Modern Occultist News

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 4 Manly P. Hall & the Angel of Independence (Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)        On this day in 1776, with the Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia and the signing of the Declaration of Independence hanging in genuine doubt, a stranger no one recognized rose at the back of the chamber. According to the legend, he delivered a thunderous, electrifying speech—"Sign! sign, if the next moment the gibbet’s rope is around your neck!”—that broke the delegates’ hesitation completely. They rushed forward to sign. When they turned to thank him, he had vanished from a room that, by every account, had been locked from the inside. No one ever learned his name. It is one of the most beloved legends in American civic mythology, repeated from pulpits, classrooms, and at least one presidential commencement address. It also, ...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 3 Don Pedro Jaramillo: Curandero, Shaman, and Folk Saint (Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)       On this day in1907, Don Pedro Jaramillo died at his ranch along Los Olmos Creek in what is now Brooks County, Texas, having spent nearly four decades as the most sought-after healer in the South Texas borderlands. By the time of his death, families were traveling to see him from as far away as New York City and now, more than a century later, pilgrims still leave offerings at his roadside shrine outside Falfurrias, Texas: votive candles, photographs of the sick, handwritten letters of thanks, all to a man Mexican-American communities have never stopped calling el mero jefe —“the real chief,” or, the genuine article, among curanderos. Jaramillo belongs to a tradition this column has not yet had occasion to explore: curanderismo , the s...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 2 The Occult Roots of World UFO Day (Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)        Happy World UFO Day! As declared by the World UFO Day Organization itself, today marks the official date commemorating the Roswell incident : the alleged 1947 crash near Roswell, New Mexico, in which the U.S. military first announced the recovery of a “flying disc,” then quickly retracted the statement in favor of a far less interesting “weather balloon.” The day was established in 2001 by UFO researcher Haktan Akdogan, with the explicit goal of encouraging governments to declassify their files and to take seriously what its founders describe as “the undoubted existence of UFOs.” This column has spent the better part of a month tracing the occult and esoteric undercurrents beneath events most people would never think to examine that way—a moon exp...

ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY July 1 The Last Prophecy of Nostradamus (Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)         On this night in 1566, in the small Provençal town of Salon-de-Provence, an aging physician and astrologer turned to his secretary, Jean de Chavigny , and delivered what would become his single most famous and most personally consequential prediction: “You will not find me alive at sunrise.” By most accounts, he was right. The man who would go on to become the most famous prophet in Western history—whose name has been attached, with wildly varying degrees of legitimacy, to predictions of everything from the French Revolution to the September 11 attacks—spent the final hours of his own life demonstrating the one prophetic talent that has never been seriously disputed: an accurate read on his own mortal coil. From Plague Doctor to Royal Astrologer ...